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Oh, Calcaneus!

Foremost and most obvious–the physical inconvenience.
Then, the emotional trauma.
Then, the psychological stuff, which was maybe the worst part.

It’s not often anymore that I make a really BIG mistake.
This was a really BIG mistake.
An accident, you might say.

I fell off a ladder.
Pow! A quick impact, and a quick understanding that I had screwed up.

A major lapse in gravitational adherence to balance.
A new physical condition that was so suddenly immediate, obvious, and powerfully irreversible.

And aren’t most accidents like that?

The quick-impact-thing means you don’t have time to ponder any options.
No rationalizations. No analysis. No escape.
Welcome to your brand-new, unrehearsed, harsh, direct, real-time reality.
Now go directly to Plan B. The plan you hadn’t any reason to formulate just moments earlier.

I fell off a ladder. I broke my heel, and a computer.
Which I happened to be holding when I slipped, off the ladder.
Eight megabytes and a dusty keyboard.
A miserable, worthless 286-piece-of-junk computer.

Not worth the trouble of even going into the garage to store it…anywhere.
Let alone hoisting it up to a loft. What was I thinking?
It would have been so wise to have just paid a young kid to haul it to a trash can for me.

I somehow conjured up the most powerful humor of my life while on the examining table at the Evergreen Medical Clinic. The nurses marveled at my frivolous disposition.

“How can he revel in jest when his heel is smashed to bits?”

Maybe I just thought I was funny, as I sat there with a foot on fire and really, really out of whack. Or maybe I was in shock.

It became my utmost priority, and personal goal, to get the darn thing back into order, back in alignment, back to normal. Soon. I was out of sorts.